Faced with the unanimity of protests from all democrats attached to our great Republican values, from all defenders of the rule of law and all human rights activists, panic is taking hold among the sorcerers apprentices in the offices of the president and the prime minister who have chosen to play with this explosive issue: that of the right to nationality. The numerous factual errors made by those in government who advocate the stripping of French nationality from dual nationals who commit acts of terrorism against France - Prime Minister Manuel Valls had to correct his Facebook entry on the issue – is testament to that. As is the way that the Belgian media and German politicians have been able to pick holes in Valls' attempts to use those countries' policies on dual nationality to bolster his own plans.
To all this we can add some colossal stupidity including, in particular, the bar-room argument along the lines of: “As these French people have killed French people, they no longer deserve to be French.” Knowing that there are on average close to 700 homicides a year in Metropolitan France, with the majority of victims being French, should it therefore be decreed that the author of any blood crime excludes themselves from the national community and that a double penalty should be applied, stripping them of their nationality on top of a prison sentence? Moreover, and most importantly, this spitefully stupid argument leads to the poison of xenophobia: is it now far more serious to kill a French person than a foreigner? Will there be a category of superior humans, our nationals, who are to be protected more than lesser humans, foreign nationals who are resident in our country?
These aberrations, faithfully communicated by the government's mouthpieces, leave one to suppose that we really are witnessing a catastrophic headlong rush by irresponsible leaders who are more concerned with protecting themselves then protecting us. In essence, François Hollande has not only committed the same mistake as former president Nicolas Sarkozy did in 2010 with his infamous speech at Grenoble in eastern France he has, moreover, committed it for the same base reasons: short-term political calculation and presidential egotism. Neither of them, either through a lack of culture or foolhardiness, has understood the enormity of what they were saying.
The context of Nicolas Sarkozy's remarks in Grenoble on July 30th, 2010 is not discussed enough. For at the time he gave that speech, in which he said that “any person of foreign origin” who deliberately endangered the life of a public official should be stripped of French nationality, the then-president had just endured a torrid month. His presidency had been shaken by a series of revelations in the Bettencourt Affair, in particular from Mediapart. Hi inner circle had been directly hit and, uncertain of what would happen judicially, he feared that the affair would become like the plaster on Captain Haddock in one of the Tintin comic book stories – and stick to his skin indefinitely.
Sarkozy's announcement was just a diversionary tactic, even if it was in line with the ideological line that saw his creation in 2007 of the 'Ministry for National Identity and Immigration'. It should be recalled that the first minister of that new ministry was Éric Besson who had been, some months earlier, a national secretary of the Socialist Party (PS) at the time when François Hollande was its first secretary. Far from reducing the seriousness of this attack on our fundamental values, this opportunistic motivation heaped further devastation on a presidency that had become dangerous, to the point where, as Mediapart explained at the time, it was represented by a “constitutional criminal”, a reference to Sarkozy himself. At that period a Canal+ television documentary recorded an impromptu conversation between myself and François Hollande on the subject in which the then PS party boss asked me: “So, you still haven't arrested the criminal?” There is a bitter irony in looking back at that exchange today.
For, alas, Nicolas Sarkozy's successor as head of state today shows himself to be the sorcerer's apprentice, and every bit as dangerous, as, through sheer political calculation, he blows up the dams that protect the essence of the Republic, its political identity. Doubtless, thinking about potential new attacks, François Hollande wondered how he would be able to confront them without the opposition and public opinion raising questions over his government's responsibility. For, after all, the duty of a state is above all to protect its citizens. Already there is no shortage of awkward questions, as Mediapart has documented, over the failure of France's fight against terrorism (see here and here for example). This explains the president's raising of the stakes in his speech to an extraordinary Congress of the French Parliament on November 16th, a few days after the Paris attacks, in which he prolonged the state of emergency and called for dual nationals who commit acts of terrorism to lose their French nationality. It had little to do with making the fight against terrorism more effective, but was largely a diversion aimed at stymieing the Right, even the extreme-right, who had called for such measures.
The flow of non-stop news coverage is now so swift that already one has forgotten that, at the time of the speech, some commentators credited François Hollande with having pulled off a fiendishly clever gambit, without paying heed to the ideological bomb that he had activated. From the outset we have written: to brandish the removal of nationality as a symbolic weapon against terrorism is to open the door to the ideology of national purification, that intellectual poison according to which, to use the formula employed by Sophocles in Oedipus the King, evil cannot be in us, France and the French, but can only come from outside, from abroad, elsewhere. Once this door is opened it is not about to be closed again any time soon, as the far-right Front National already want to “go further” in national purification. It is even less likely to be closed when the government digs its heels in on the issue, more concerned to see if it will have enough Parliamentarians from the Right and the extreme-right to vote through its “Protection of the Nation” law than to listen to the rational and informed arguments of its opponents – many from the Left, but not exclusively.
A government supposedly of the Left has thus raised up “Protection of the Nation”as its symbol for the outside world, the threat that dual nationality represents to the French people. As soon as this major policy, officially proposed and signed by François Hollande, Manuel Valls and justice minister Christiane Taubira, was brought in it became clear immediately that the government had taken its first step down a slippery slope – and it only takes the first step for you to plunge headlong. So without the Front National even having to force home the advantage, it was quickly suggested that, in the name of equality among French people, dual nationals or otherwise, one could eventually envisage creating stateless people by stripping French citizenship from people with just one nationality.
First of all we read this surprising passage, written in a tone of regret, in the briefing paper addressed by the Socialist Party to its Parliamentarians last week in defence of the planned government measure (see here, in French). The document is so badly written that one puts its clumsiness down to the fact that it was scrambled together in a hurry. Nonetheless, the ruling party states in it that it would have seemed logical to strip French nationality from all people who committed a terrorist crime “whether they are a dual national or not”. However – and one can almost hear an “alas” here – the note points out that the international principles that France recognise “forbid making a person stateless”. The passage (below in French) reads in full: “Theoretically, one should be able to remove French nationality from anyone who commits a terrorist crime, whether they are a dual national or not. But the international principles that France has recognised forbid making a person stateless.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
One would obviously have preferred to read that the fundamental principles of the French Republic itself, and not just those that come from international agreements, formally outlawed the creation of people with no nationality. And thus, as a result, people with no citizenship, people condemned to roam a planet where they would no longer have any state protection, a planet without a visa as far as they are concerned, politically uninhabitable and unlivable. Yet what was just an initial warning, based on a hastily and badly written note, has become today an entirely more serious alert.
To lose all political rights is to be excluded from humanity
Thus we have witnessed an astonishing proposition put forward by one of the rare constitutional experts to come to the aid of François Hollande and Manuel Valls, even though this expert – Olivier Duhamel - was among those who condemned Nicolas Sarkozy on the issue in 2010 (see his comments on this at the time on Mediapart, in French, here and here). After arguing in favour of a measure which as far as he is concerned poses no serious legal problem or symbolic danger, Duhamel ends up sanctimoniously proposing the following in the columns of Le Monde: that the removal of nationality is possible for all those who commit crimes of terrorism “whether they have two nationalities or one”. And that, as a result, that France should go back on its international commitment not to create stateless people.
The full passage from Olivier Duhamel, a professor at the prestigious Sciences Po institute in Paris, reads: “The best outcome: let's try to find a solution that would once again be in harmony. Either by looking along the lines of [an offence of] 'national unworthiness' (1), in order to avoid removing [nationality]. Or, better, by going to the logical and just conclusion – even if it means, if necessary, reviewing international commitments regarding stateless people. So that the removal [of nationality] from the authors of terrorist crimes is possible for everyone, whether they have two nationalities or one. In that way we would finally make no distinction between all French people.”
We are really in Orwellian times when such an outrage is put forward in the name of equality. Hell is often paved with good intentions, in the legal arena, amid political foolhardiness. In fact, France has still not ratified the 1961 United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which still leaves open the possibility of removing nationality from its own citizens even if it renders them stateless. This is what explains the supposedly egalitarian zeal to enlarge the scope of removing nationality to all, on the pretext of not creating segregation by just targeting dual nationals.
But these desperate attempts by the authorities hide the essential: that those who should be protecting us from terrorist aggression are turning France against itself, its unity, its trust, its diversity. The slippery slope we are so tragically heading down recalls another, the one that Europe tumbled down in the last century. It is in fact article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that intended to give an individual the fundamental right to have a legal attachment to a state, whoever and wherever they are, and independent of their acts: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” (See here a UNHCR pamphlet on nationality and statelessness aimed at Parliamentarians.)
If this principle was enunciated after the European catastrophe which, from 1914 to 1945, put the whole world in peril, it was because this catastrophe had been a tragic demonstration of what could result from the undermining by states themselves of the protection that they owe their citizens, whoever they are. In summary the result was: the symbolic expulsion of a legal persona, someone who had rights and who could assert them, of groups of humans who, as a result, were defenceless in the face of totalitarian ideologies who strove to make them disappear.
In 1951 an immense book, one that has today become a classic, exposed this downwards spiral very clearly, accompanied by a warning that all Parliamentarians would be well advised to read or re-read before making their mind up on this current legislation that, far from protecting it, puts our nation in danger. The book in question is the reference work The Origins of Totalitarianism by philosopher Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish émigré who lived first in France then the United States. And, more precisely, the pivotal chapter in her work, the one that makes the link between the blindness of imperialism and the catastrophe of totalitarianism. This is chapter IX, entitled: 'The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man'.
In this chapter Arendt shows that the brutalisation caused by the Great War of 1914 to 1918 led to a “completely new element of disintegration at the heart of European societies”. She wrote: “Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents.”
One could believe that these lines refer directly to the debate in France today, right down to the choice of words: “constitutional”, “values” and “opponents” and so on. They begin a formal demonstration in which Hannah Arendt holds up the protection of minorities – the fate that awaits them – and the situation of stateless people – the fact of producing them – as the decisive impulse behind the destruction of domestic politics in Europe between the wars, as imperfect as they had been then. Against a backdrop of the the same security arguments about protecting the nation and wounded national identity, there was a gradual acclimatisation to the idea that there were people without rights who would become displaced people, people without asylum, people stripped of all protection. And as a result, dehumanised.
This, insists Arendt, is what Europe's tragic history has taught us: the forfeiture of political rights is the start of a loss of humanity. “The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged,” she writes. The “loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether”. Arendt continues: “Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity [editor's note, political structure] itself expels him from humanity.”
One can grasp the level of errors that our sorcerers' apprentices have achieved when they allow their supporters to accept what is the core of anti-humanist and anti-democratic ideologies: this idea that security demands permit one to dispossess humans of any homeland, of any political status, of any legal security. As Arendt again pointed out, this blight “bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down.” She continues: “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
Arendt also reminds us of the old Hitler saying: “Right is what is good for the German people.” It is, alas, the kind of thinking we hear in France today, and not just in Ajaccio, in Corsica, the scene of recent disturbances. Proclaiming human rights also means affirming that the law is attached to the dignity of the human being, whoever they are. One of Arendt's favourite references was this quotation from the French writer David Rousset, who survived German concentration camps, about the inability to communicate the horror of the crimes committed in such camps: “What common sense and 'normal people' refuse to believe is that everything is possible.”
Is there still time for the self-proclaimed “normal president” François Hollande to understand that he has just led France onto a slippery slope where everything is indeed possible, and especially the worst?
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1. The offence of Indignité nationale or “national unworthiness” was introduced in France after World War II to deal with behaviour under the Nazi Occupation that did not qualify as treason or other crimes, but was regarded as so morally repugnant as to be worthy of punishment under the criminal law.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter